Repeating you claims that solar and wind will solve the problem of not enough electricity at night will not actually solve it, short of massive and prohibitively expensive interconnects.

I don't gather that anyone is making that claim. The nighttime problem will be addressed with other sources of energy production, including little or no new nuclear production.

Exactly. In the near term, for the US, natural-gas-fired generation is almost a "no brainer." If one compares SotA combined-cycle gas-fired generation (GE guarantees efficiency = 65%, Siemens just slightly less ... today) with typical older non-supercritical coal-fired steam plants (typical thermodynamic efficiencies around 35% - 38% before losses to power pollution control systems are added) and then factors in the carbon/Joule ratios of natural gas vs coal we could cut the CO2 produced by the electric power industry to 1/3 of present doing nothing else.

These combined-cycle plants have fairly high capital costs, but NOTHING like the capital or lead time or risk associated with a nuclear power plant.

Folks may not be aware of what is happening in the generating market in the US today:

Quote:

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=8450Until 2010, substitution between the two fuels for electricity generation was not widespread in most U.S. regions. However, through 2010, 2011, and most dramatically in 2012, a shift in the historical spread between the average regional operating costs of combined-cycle natural gas fired and coal-fired generators led operators to run natural gas-fired combined-cycle plants for longer periods, while generation from coal-fired generators declined substantially.

During the first half of 2012, lower consumption of coal at electric power plants led to high coal stocks and a decrease in spot prices for eastern coal. Higher-than-normal coal stocks may continue to place downward pressure on coal prices. Also, high stocks could lead to additional coal burn if the size of coal stockpiles becomes a major concern. Utilities may also resell coal, even rerouting purchases before they are delivered to the plant. Coal is also being exported in growing volumes.

Natural-gas combined-cycle is starting to kill coal, "straight up" on cost of fuel. That's cost of fuel, in already built plants -- the coal plants are being turned off and the CC natural-gas plants run at high output.

This is why nobody in their right mind is proposing a new coal plant today in the US. New-technology coal-fire is considerably more expensive than the older plants, both due to increased pollution control requirements and the fact that due to the (relatively) high costs of coal and consequences of pollution control requirements new coal-fired plants are being pushed toward super-critical higher-efficiency designs all around the world (approx 42%), with ironically the Chinese being the leader at these now.

Coal-to-electricity is close to being DOA, and the combined environmental and health effects of coal are so bad that I think the one proposition which is likely to be accepted nearly universally on this thread is that we ought to cease coal-fired electricity generation ASAP.

In this regard I am not a fan of the fracking industry, but I find it inconceivable that it could produce comparable environmental damage to coal mining, given any reasonable attempt at prudent regulations.

But this reality of cheap and available natural gas is the reality that is killing interest in nuclear, also impeding wind and solar right now.

But the competing realities are that:

* wind at good sites is the cheapest new generating capacity one can buy. That's amazing if you think about it. The problem is that much of the best wind resource in the US is rather far from markets. Still, wind is going in fast at sites which are favorable for output and market(s), And transmission capacity to exploit farther resources is also getting built, because it is economical to do so.

* solar PV is also at cost parity with coal or nearly so in the very high solar resource areas of the American Southwest, for multi-MW installations at favorable sites. ( Residential solar power isn't, due to diseconomies of boutique installlation/contracting, very high installation costs per watt, usually poor siting. )

Wind and solar are getting built, at increasing rates and with decreasing prices. For all practical purposes nuclear plants aren't. That's reality right now. There's a reason for it.

Shread: I expect you to abandon two unsupported claims, the first of which you repeat over and over again:

Quote:

... claims that solar and wind will solve the problem of not enough electricity at night will not actually solve it, short of massive and prohibitively expensive interconnects.

My information on Yucca was based on a conversation with a hydrologist friend of mine ....

With regard to the first of these, DUH, the wind DOES blow at night, commonly. In fact statistically the winds are slightly stronger at night at many favorable wind-power sites. Your claims about "will not actually solve it" and "prohibitively expensive" transmission are completely unsubstantiated, and just plain wrong. All the studies, and the power utilities investing in transmission to bring new wind-power resource on line, disagree with you. Texas is not a hippy-dippy greenie state, outside Austin. Texas is the state most identified with oil production and the state of Joe Barton, Louie Gohmert, Ted Cruz. Texas is the state of the union with both the largest and fastest growing wind-power industry and commitment to major transmission improvements to bring much more wind-power to market. Texas is not investing in nuclear reactors. (AFAIK the one potential site there for a BWR is moribund?)

As to the second -- "my buddy sez..." just doesn't cut it. The official reports from the Yucca test site detail the findings I stated. I agree that just how serious these may be is open to some interpretation, and neither of us is a groundwater and transport expert. But the fact of the matter is that these reports doom Yucca as a repository site. The whole idea of Yucca as a feasible site was predicated on that tuff being impermeable (because the site is perched so high above the water table), and evidence to the contrary kills the site unless it can be thoroughly disproven. Harry Reid could die of a stroke tomorrow and Yucca would still not be revived.

You demonize Harry Reid because this allows you to think that when he goes, everyone else will rally around Yucca and make it go forward. The Nevada representatives in both the house and senate are going to fight Yucca relentlessly, no matter what party they represent. Polling results in Nevada and Sharron Angle proved that.

Perhaps your secondary assumption is that in the end all the other states will gang-rape Nevada again, but bluntly I doubt that too. The population of Nevada and the number of house representatives and electoral college votes are too large.

Just looking at reality, Nevada has 2.5 times the population of Montana and 5 times the population of Wyoming. Doesn't take a genius to figure out where to look first for a geologically-acceptable site.

And Wyoming is today the largest coal-producing state in the US, a state founded on extractive industries.

This is why nobody in their right mind is proposing a new coal plant today in the US. New-technology coal-fire is considerably more expensive than the older plants, both due to increased pollution control requirements and the fact that due to the (relatively) high costs of coal and consequences of pollution control requirements new coal-fired plants are being pushed toward super-critical higher-efficiency designs all around the world (approx 42%), with ironically the Chinese being the leader at these now.

Coal-to-electricity is close to being DOA, and the combined environmental and health effects of coal are so bad that I think the one proposition which is likely to be accepted nearly universally on this thread is that we ought to cease coal-fired electricity generation ASAP.

China's introduced CO2 taxes of $1.60/ton starting in 2015 rising to $8/ton in 2020. What do you think that'll do to the economies of using coal over there?

My take is that they're open to both the existing mixup of light water reactors, and advanced fuel cycles, and willing to spend the money to put all of the above through their paces, and frankly better at getting stuff built on schedule than the west is (they'll have the first AP1000 in service AFAICT?). They don't give a shit about the waste problem one way or the other. Coal prices, coal imports, and air quality issues have risen to the point of national security concerns. And they're still doing more wind/solar than they are nuclear.

My take is that they're open to both the existing mixup of light water reactors, and advanced fuel cycles, and willing to spend the money to put all of the above through their paces, and frankly better at getting stuff built on schedule than the west is (they'll have the first AP1000 in service AFAICT?). They don't give a shit about the waste problem one way or the other. Coal prices, coal imports, and air quality issues have risen to the point of national security concerns. And they're still doing more wind/solar than they are nuclear.

I would love to see a projection for China's generation mix over the next decade or two. Any chance that's available?

Prices change. Two-three years ago, coal was more inexpensive than gas, being about half the price. Now gas is half the price of coal. Nuclear, meanwhile, keeps chugging along at pretty much the same price, which is only slightly more than coal in the U.S. for new plants, by projection; we'll see when construction is complete on a few of them. The amortized plants generate good income. The gas price tanked, as I reported previously, because the utilities were locked into more drilling by the type of financing they arranged. Those deals are ending now; then prices should start to equilibrate. The gas drillers can only afford to bring in a well now because of the financing they're locked into. Gas prices might even bounce past coal before settling down to an equilibrium price. We'll have to wait to see what that might be.

Regarding Yucca Mountain, the permeability of the tuff there had been put to rest, last I heard, and the antis were moving on to another objection. I would be open to a change of mind with a proper citation.

I note in the NY Times yesterday that Harry Reid's buddy who was chair of the NRC has resigned and can no longer demand filters for all the boiling water nukes.

It's heartening to hear about all these transmission lines being built to bring windpower to the East Coast. Now, if only it were true.

Rock matrix properties vary vertically and laterally as the result of depositional processes and subsequent postdepositional alteration. Laboratory tests indicate that the average matrix porosity and hydraulic conductivity values for the main level of the proposed repository (Topopah Spring Tuff middle nonlithophysal zone) are 0.08 and 4.7 × 10−12 m/s, respectively. In situ fracture hydraulic conductivity values are 3–6 orders of magnitude greater. The permeability of fault zones is approximately an order of magnitude greater than that of the surrounding rock unit. Water samples from the fault zones have tritium concentrations that indicate some component of postnuclear testing. Gas and water vapor movement through the unsaturated zone is driven by changes in barometric pressure, temperature-induced density differences, and wind effects. The subsurface pressure response to surface barometric changes is controlled by the distribution and interconnectedness of fractures, the presence of faults and their ability to conduct gas and vapor, and the moisture content and matrix permeability of the rock units.

That's bad. The tritium contamination from recent bomb testing is a killer to the idea that the tuff can remain isolated for geological times. Ditto barometric and wind response. That's basically ghastly.

Quote:

Shread: It's heartening to hear about all these transmission lines being built to bring windpower to the East Coast. Now, if only it were true.

Who said anything about the east coast, at least right now?

Shifting topic folks might want to see this article at EET which discusses two new technologies:

He employed Bradwell -- then a post-doc at MIT -- to create the battery from his concept of using metals that when heated form liquids that are the basis for the battery, using a low-density liquid metal at top, a high-density liquid metal at bottom with a layer of molten salt in between as the electrolyte. The first battery created by Sadoway and Bradwell used magnesium at the top as the negative electrode and antimony at the bottom as the positive electrode.

The chemistry works like this: When the battery discharges power, magnesium atoms give off electrons that travel through the salt layer and react with the antimony. This forms an alloy and expands the bottom layer of the cell, or the cathode. To charge, the battery itself acts like a metal smelter, separating the magnesium from its alloy back through the electrolyte to return to the magnesium. In this way, too, the battery self heats, which keeps the metals liquid.

Ambri has since started using less expensive and higher voltage metals and salt for the battery, but it continues to work in the same way, according to the company. Eventually the cells will be stacked into modules the size of 40-ft shipping containers with “the nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours -- 2 million watt-hours,” Sadoway said. “That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households,” he said. “So here you have it, grid-level storage: silent, emissions-free, no moving parts, remotely controlled, designed to the market price point without subsidy.”

Ambri is not the only company that’s invented new technology that could allow energy generated by wind and solar sources to take a more central role in the utility grid. Automation vendor ABB said recently it had solved a longtime problem of how to transport power over long distances with the design of the first circuit breaker for high-voltage direct current, or HVDC. This would allow for connections between large wind farms and solar power grids from different places to be plugged into the traditional power grid, the company said.

The battery story is one of a great many coming forward, who knows if it will be a/the winner. It has the virtue of being cheap and apparently simple however. The short blurb about ABB's HV switch doesn't really tell the story right. HVDC switches/breakers exist. This is apparently a better design.

Natural-gas fired peaking generation in the New England area is getting badly squeezed by inadequate natural gas transmission delivery, and peak demand prices have gotten "out of hand."

The article makes a round-about circular finger-pointing exercise out of it which isn't very informative. The obvious answer(s) are that the market can (in theory) take care of this as long as demand pricing is implemented.

My take is that they're open to both the existing mixup of light water reactors, and advanced fuel cycles, and willing to spend the money to put all of the above through their paces, and frankly better at getting stuff built on schedule than the west is (they'll have the first AP1000 in service AFAICT?). They don't give a shit about the waste problem one way or the other. Coal prices, coal imports, and air quality issues have risen to the point of national security concerns. And they're still doing more wind/solar than they are nuclear.

I would love to see a projection for China's generation mix over the next decade or two. Any chance that's available?

Coal, Coal, Coal, Coal and hydro.

Even though China is building the most wind turbines, the most PV and the most nuclear reactors in the world, their construction rates are actually below the rate of rise in electricity consumption. If China can hold the current single digit percentage values of non-coal power generation, that would be a small miracle. Hydro will decline on a relative basis significantly since nearly all big hydro projects have been completed and there is little untapped potential still available.

Natural-gas fired peaking generation in the New England area is getting badly squeezed by inadequate natural gas transmission delivery, and peak demand prices have gotten "out of hand."

The article makes a round-about circular finger-pointing exercise out of it which isn't very informative. The obvious answer(s) are that the market can (in theory) take care of this as long as demand pricing is implemented.

Prices going out of hand are in my opinion a good thing. Nothing fuels innovation more than the prospects of making lots of money. I am sure that interesting solutions will be found like grid-sized batteries and local gas storage to even out gas consumption peaks.

TOKYO - Japan will begin restarting its idled nuclear plants once new safety guidelines are in place later this year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday, moving to ensure a stable energy supply despite public safety concerns after the Fukushima disaster.

....

In January, the new nuclear agency released a list of its proposed new safety regulations, which include higher walls to protect against tsunamis, additional backup power sources for the cooling systems and construction of specially hardened earthquake-proof command centers. According to a report by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, none of Japan's 16 undamaged commercial nuclear plants would currently pass those new standards.

The newspaper said making the necessary upgrades to meet the proposed guidelines would cost plant operators a total of about $11 billion, in addition to improvements already made after the Fukushima accident. The agency has said the new guidelines will be finalized and put in place by July 18.

The new guidelines will also prohibit the restart of reactors that were built atop earthquake faults that have been active in the last 400,000 years, saying these faults could produce earthquakes again. The agency has dispatched teams of experts to begin widely watched surveys aimed at detecting whether such active fault lines run beneath any of the plants.

So far, the teams have announced they have found active faults beneath two of the plants, a discovery that may force the permanent scrapping of one or more reactors at each. Potentially active faults have been found below three other plants, including Tokyo Electric Power's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world's largest nuclear plant. The agency says further study is needed to determine if those faults are in fact active.

One can hardly be surprised that Japan must restart reactors given what a large fraction of their electric capacity they represent.

The longer term issue is will Japan build any more, also what will happen to their reprocessing program. That program has been and on-going cluster-F for many years; the poster-child of reprocessing fiasco.

Being a very mountainous island, onshore windpower is pretty bad. Off-shore would be potentially pretty good, but there we have again the issue that the coast on the west side of the islands drops off very quickly, very deeply. There are decent shallow shelf areas between Honshu and Shikoku, but for off-shore windpower the wind intensity is fairly poor there. The only true areas of sufficiently shallow coast can be found in the straits between Honshu and Korea, between Hokaido and Honshu and to the north of Hokaido towards Sachalin.

Japan being a mountainous nation and at mid (baroclinic) latitudes the wind resource along the ridge lines is decent-to-good. The problem(s) are getting that power to market and esthetics.

Obviously, a case can be made that Japan is a nation that "should" sensibly invest in nuclear power, given its other options.

I'm sorry to say that unfortunately Japan serves as the most object lesson one could ask for about what happens when nuclear power is run by boobs, crony capitalism, and a peculiar style of oligarchy and regulatory capture.

While Fukushima was directly triggered by a Tsunami, it was no "accident." The Japanese nuclear power history is one "accident" after another, endless stupidities, endless cut-corners and farcial regulation. The wikipedia article on the Japanese nuclear industry puts it rather politely as

Quote:

However, starting in the mid-1990s there were several nuclear related accidents and cover-ups in Japan that eroded public perception of the industry, resulting in protests and resistance to new plants. These accidents included the Tokaimura nuclear accident, the Mihama steam explosion, cover-ups after an accidents at the Monju reactor, among others, more recently the Chūetsu offshore earthquake aftermath. While exact details may be in dispute, it is clear that the safety culture in Japan's nuclear industry has come under greater scrutiny.

This list doesn't include the fiascos and cover-ups at Japan's efforts at reprocessing (one of these is co-located with the Monju reactor, confusingly) which are at least equally damning.

While Fukushima was a disaster by any standard.. the Japanese are lucky that the Tsunami happened along the northEAST coast of Honshu, most of the radiation went out to sea.

If you look at this map you'll see that there are 20 operational reactors on the west coast of Honshu, from Takahama to Kashiwazaki, which are upwind of the Kwanto plain (Tokyo is the mouth of this), the most densely populated part of Japan. Personally, I think this is idiot.

The Japanese also have a predilection for BWRs. I hope dio82 or UserJoe will address that, as to why.

I did not understand the plant design of the GE BWRs until the Fukushima accident made it a subject of interest. I must say that I am horrified at the intrinsic risks of that plant design, with a separate turbine house which has no real containment that directly receives the boiled reactor coolant (that's what a BWR does, no heat-exchange loop), and the weaknesses of the reactor vessels and valving. I'm aghast that this plant design ever got certified anywhere ... and we have a bunch of them in the US.

I worked at VC Summer and it's got a few advantages it's for one thing not just making power. After the savanna river site closed the US was looking for a new supplier of tritium So a bunch of contractors were employed to figure out the best way to enrich hydrogen as you know VC summer runs at 100% power control rods at the top or they are at the bottom reaction is moderated with boron in the water I thought it was crazy but then I came from the navy. I'm sure some of the costs of the new reactor can be offset by tritium production additionally VC built a reservoir with two big pumps that draw river water up during non peek usage allowing the reactor to stay at full power then during peek usage times water is feed through the pumps back into the river to make additional power. My opinion is that we can't stop nuclear proliferation so why not allow the navy squedivergent design to be used it would solve the wast problem and its safe after all we melted one down in the 60s in idaho falls I'm supposed to qualify that it was an army reactor on a naval base (thats what they told me to say when I declassified it for a book american decades the 60s back in the 90s). The story you probably already know but the idiot manually pulled a control rod causing it to eject from the reactor (yes he took the control rod drive motor off and was performing a PM). The reactor melted down never escaped the outer containment vessel they even tried to add water back into it to see if they could make it fission again. turns out pure light water pressurized reactors if they loose all there water all the neutrons go fast none get thermal so the reaction stops pretty quickly by itself. if you think about it we are just using the density of water to moderate our reaction how much more simple can you get? But putting boric acid into the water to absorb neutrons is to me wasteful as is a 12 by 12 reactor that changes fuel every 18 months when you could have a 4 by 4 reactor that doesn't change fuel for 20 years. so what if it has u235 in it by now you can probably by plutonium on the russian black market so why should america have to suffer with poor designs when we have better stuff?

coal is dead it's far to polluting. I still believe in safe nuclear power it's just a matter of getting the rules changed as to how much u235 you can have in a civilian reactor that leads to all these bad designs. And VC summer has it's sights on being the sole supplier of tritium for all those third gen nucs they have in Charleston. remember tritium's half-life is only five years so we need a regular supply of it for things like neutron weapons.

I still believe in safe nuclear power it's just a matter of getting the rules changed as to how much u235 you can have in a civilian reactor that leads to all these bad designs.

Uh, that would be interesting to hear as to why. If you are going to suggest reactors go to bomb-grade U235 cores (ala navy practice) the neutronic advantages of that are clearly understood, but the economics for civilian power production make no sense at current separation costs. There are laser technologies which promise very low cost separation. The proliferation problem associated with "technologizing" them commercially is unacceptable, IMO.

Quote:

And VC summer has it's sights on being the sole supplier of tritium for all those third gen nucs they have in Charleston. remember tritium's half-life is only five years so we need a regular supply of it for things like neutron weapons.

Uh, it's 12.3 years. I presume you are talking about tritium for the boosted triggers and possibly fusion "candles" in the nuclear weapons for the subs there. The tritium content of both the initiating (trigger) cores and the fusion substrates is classified, but the size and necessary yield of the initiating core make it absolutely obvious that it must be tritium boosted, and it is public information that the bombs do need tritium. The fusion substrates may be just Li6D, or even a mix of Li6D and Li7D, or either with tritium doping, so far as I know that remains classified for these weapons.

The US has removed all "neutron bombs" from inventory. While those bombs may have used a bit more tritium to get very high fusion yield, the principal difference between a "neutron bomb" and what we call a conventional "H-bomb" was that they did NOT have a U-238 tertiary blanket. Mother's dirty little secret about "H-bombs" is that almost all weaponized H-bombs get most of their total yield from fission, and most of that comes from using the fast fusion neutrons to fission a cheap U238 blanket. A "neutron bomb" gives away a lot of "free" yield, and that's why they aren't kept anymore.

There's no civilian reactor need for tritium until we get to fusion reactors, at which point they will breed it in a lithium "blanket" from their own (highly energetic) neutron flux.

coal is dead it's far to polluting. I still believe in safe nuclear power it's just a matter of getting the rules changed as to how much u235 you can have in a civilian reactor that leads to all these bad designs. And VC summer has it's sights on being the sole supplier of tritium for all those third gen nucs they have in Charleston. remember tritium's half-life is only five years so we need a regular supply of it for things like neutron weapons.

Huh ... I do have to correct you an several things.

Coal being dead, well, outside of North America it is unfortunately very alive and kicking. The USA being the second largest CO2 polluter in the world will make a significant difference with its switch from coal to fracking gas. I am just not sure if the amazing coal consumption growth rates in the ROTW will compensate that effect. The perhaps biggest difference that can be made on world wide CO2 emissions would be China successfully deploying shale gas fracking.

The thing that I have learned about shale gas is that the techniques developed in the USA are highly specific to the two shale formations exploited in the US. Translating these techniques 1-to-1 to other shale geological formations will most probably not work, or they may need experimentation and optimisations. So the ROTW is working slowly on expanding shale gas exploitation outside of the USA, but initial progress will be slow. Let's wait and see how the next 5 years will develop.

Now onto the things where I have to correct you:

Nuclear safety is not really dependent on U235 enrichment levels. U235 enrichment levels have at first only an impact on criticality, but this is THE area where no compromises and absolute safety are enforced world wide. The U235 enrichment levels are limited by many factors relating to core neutronics, core thermal hydraulics and metallurgy of aging and corrosion. U235 does have an indirect effect on the safety of cooling a core wrt. to decay heat. A core with 5% U235 enrichment will contain towards its end of deployment (~6-8 years) more than twice as many fission products as an old core with 3.3% U235 enrichment. This means that the decay heat loads that the safety systems need to wash away will increase, as well as a reduction in grace periods during design basis accidents. But realistically speaking, this is just a minor quantitive difference that is caught by the margins within the design. It does not change the qualitative aspects of plant safety, i.e. an unsafe design does not become significanty worse, safe designs remain safe. The only part where I see that a physical tipping-point may be reached would lie in the area of in-vessel core melt retention. There are several processes going on with RPV erosion and thermal load that may reach a tipping point causing the RPV to burst due to an effect called "metal knifing" (depending on prevalent chemisty of the core melt, a layer of liquid metal may from that will transport most of the decay heat into a narrow band of the RPV). This is by the way also the hard limit on the AP1000 wrt. to its maximum allowable thermal power. I am fairly sure that this limit will increase slowly over time for the AP1000, though.

TritiumTritium is absolutely not used in any way in a civilian reactor, and it won't be used in the future for any. To be exact, it is a highly undesireablbe product of fission and neutron capture that necessitates a continous replacement and ejection of primary system water to the environment.

Tritium can only be used for fusion, hence current and only application of Tritium is in nuclear weapons. There are also some emergent uses coming from fusion research, for example small, high quality, neutron sources exist that produce neutrons via D+T fusion reaction initiated in compact accelerator neutron generators (very cool technology btw).

CANDUs, well CANDUs … I am not that well informed about them, especially I don’t know the current status of projects in Canada and Romania.

Romania reportedly has three shells waiting to be completed, but given that construction on the 5 reactors started in 1982 and the second wasn't finished until 2007, and the partnership to finish the next two has been shedding partners like cats shed hair, it might be a while. In Canada, there are no active projects.

CANDU is now owned by SNC-Lavelin though, so it has the backing of a rather large multinational construction company. That's about the best that can be said about their prospects. Their entry in your list is the Advanced CANDU Reactor (ACR-1000), an: "evolutionary, Generation III+, 1200 MWe class heavy water reactor, designed to meet industry and public expectations for safe, reliable, environmentally friendly and low-cost nuclear generation."

If one of those is going to be built, it will be built in Ontario. The government wants new nuclear, and site selection is undergoing final phase environmental assessment and consultation. However, there's hard push back against it by the usual environmental groups/locals and the price tag is reportedly substantially above what the Provincial Government is willing to pay even at the initial estimate which will be wrong. There are currently no other prospects in Canada. New Brunswick just finished refurbishing their pre-existing CANDU Plant and that went way over budget (dumping two turbines into the harbour and having to remove and install all the calandria tubes twice didn't help....), Quebec shutdown their last reactor last year as a result of political blowback after Fukushima and the likely simple reality that the province has shit-tons of Hydro Electric they ship south at a profit already and are going to be adding more, and Bruce Power shelved all plans to construct in Alberta to power the oil sands plants in 2010 or so after refurbishment at their station in Ontario went massively over time and budget and Nat Gas fell through the floor.

So, it falls on Ontario to save the former AECL and cut them a check unless they throw up a big middle finger to some of their own constituents (AECL and the new CANDU Energy Inc are largely based in and employ people in Ontario), blow the company off and goto open bid. Which would be seen unfavourably by the Federal government given that they still employ most of the research staff at AECL proper and would pretty much eliminate any likelihood of them picking up costs on overruns.

coal is dead it's far to polluting. I still believe in safe nuclear power it's just a matter of getting the rules changed as to how much u235 you can have in a civilian reactor that leads to all these bad designs. And VC summer has it's sights on being the sole supplier of tritium for all those third gen nucs they have in Charleston. remember tritium's half-life is only five years so we need a regular supply of it for things like neutron weapons.

Nuclear safety is not really dependent on U235 enrichment levels. U235 enrichment levels have at first only an impact on criticality, but this is THE area where no compromises and absolute safety are enforced world wide. The U235 enrichment levels are limited by many factors relating to core neutronics, core thermal hydraulics and metallurgy of aging and corrosion. U235 does have an indirect effect on the safety of cooling a core wrt. to decay heat. A core with 5% U235 enrichment will contain towards its end of deployment (~6-8 years) more than twice as many fission products as an old core with 3.3% U235 enrichment. This means that the decay heat loads that the safety systems need to wash away will increase, as well as a reduction in grace periods during design basis accidents.

This by the way makes those no-reprocessing breeders so awful. Essentially, what you have is high concentration nuclear waste inside an operating reactor. It's mostly advertised via years that the waste is dangerous for, which is rather misleading as the transuranics really aren't going anywhere, even if you blow up a reactor to bits, it's the fission products that are a big problem.

What's the take on Transatomic Power's new molten salt reactor design that apparently uses current light water waste for the reaction and the waste only stays radioactive for hundreds, not thousands, of years?

After reading the Discovery article, my biggest concern would be ensuring the radioactive gasses involved don't get loose. Nothing like a cloud of radioactive gas to ruin the days of many cities.

I hope they get it sorted out, because it sounds like this would seriously cut back on places like Yucca mountain.

What's the take on Transatomic Power's new molten salt reactor design that apparently uses current light water waste for the reaction and the waste only stays radioactive for hundreds, not thousands, of years?

There's several lengthy and highly informative Observatory threads on different reactors including various molten salt concepts.

scorpicon wrote:

After reading the Discovery article, my biggest concern would be ensuring the radioactive gasses involved don't get loose. Nothing like a cloud of radioactive gas to ruin the days of many cities.

The total inventory of the gasses is small and they don't last very long. I think the greater concern expressed around here is the prospect of the fuel salt itself getting loose. Also these reactors tend to run a harder neutron spectrum, which can make them touchy.

scorpicon wrote:

I hope they get it sorted out, because it sounds like this would seriously cut back on places like Yucca mountain.

What's the take on Transatomic Power's new molten salt reactor design that apparently uses current light water waste for the reaction and the waste only stays radioactive for hundreds, not thousands, of years?

I immediately hate any design which is pitched via such deceptive statements. The natural uranium stays radioactive for billions of years, so what. The most problematic component of the waste is fission products (e.g. Cs-137 , half life about 30 years), those are pretty much equally present per-MWH. The molten-salt reactor has fewer transuranics, which have long half life (and are less radioactive), and are also very immobile - only a very small fraction of those escaped in Chernobyl accident. Transuranics sound scariest - plutonium, neptunium... etc, and have scary long half life. Yet in Chernobyl we aren't waiting for those to decay, we're waiting for Cs-137, Sr-90, and the like.

If we are going to take the globe out of poverty, we must dramatically lower the cost of clean energy. So, I have been trying to imagine what a global nuclear system might look like if we could start from scratch. Here's what I've come up with so far...

Many potential nuclear energy customers hate the current products: they're large, inefficient, dirty (relatively), take a long time to build, cost far too much, and the waste system that goes with them remains a very hard sell.

I think we need to be considering how we are going to build out 50 TW of global nuclear capacity by 2050. Current global energy consumption is on the order of 17 TW, which includes energy in all its forms. Conservative projections range from 2 to 3 times that amount for what will be needed by 2050. This is a daunting challenge, and when I have suggested that we build tens of thousands of reactors, detractors have insisted that it is impossible. Maybe it is, but I have yet to see the proof.

A nuclear economy can grow with the availability of fissile. Typically this is U235 or bred Pu239, but U233 is also possible. Today we mine deposits that range in grade from 18% to well below 1%, and to get our fissile which is less than a percent of that, requires a lot of enrichment. Of course, fuel cost is not typically a dominate factor in nuclear economics, so this cost and inconvenience is ignored. If it was desired, we could breed fissile on a mass scale, producing say 1000 tons of U233 a year with less than 200 GW of super-breeder capacity. Consider what we might do with all of that very compact portable energy...

Molten salt reactor technology should allow us to mass produce small to large scale plants with very low liability and cost. The basic science has already been done, and what remains is essentially system integration and the challenges of development. The inherent safety features of these types of systems should go a long way to mitigating fears related to this form of energy, drastically reducing costs related to liability. They also happen to be very efficient both in regards to fuel usage and and size. The high heat capacity of the molten salts allow us to put a higher capacity reactor in a smaller package, making it easier to deliver the entire machine (not just a pressure vessel) to the desired site. The molten salt system allows for the possibility of online fuel processing, so that waste can be separated, vitrified, and passed to a standardized waste system if desired (though some designs may choose to retain the "ash" as its decay heat contributes to the machine's efficiency).

I can see no reason why we can not develop a waste system that moves unwanted dangerous material directly from the reactor to the waste disposal site (a designated deep hole in the ground). What matters here is doing so safely, but if the waste is vitrified and packaged at the plant into a small standardized heavily shielded high level waste shipping container, a truck can just haul it off to an automated disposer system, or alternatively one with with a fast spectrum "burner" to eat up any leftover transuranics (thermal MSRs can produce some leftover). This way, we can scale up production of liquid fuel reactor deployment without going through the current waste facilities that store the solid-fuel leftovers.

So, we mass produce our fissile without escalating U mining operations. Th will become widely available from the rare earth mining waste stream. Our fissile is used to start new machines at a rate largely determined by the desired neutron spectrum (a harder spectrum requires more fissile) and our super breeding capacity. This is what I imagine will constitute the Thorium Race in the years to come.

But this is impossible under the current regulatory regime. The super breeders function by way of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives (miniature fusion charges from 2-20 kt), and the high quality fissile is a major security risk. So, governments that host super breeder facilities get a piece of the reactor manufacturing industry. Security of fissile is managed through locality, just-in-time manufacturing (so no stockpiling), open international monitoring of production, small heavily shielded transport canisters, and gamma radiation from U232. Once the machine is up and running, it breeds new fissile from inserted Th232.

An international agreement on this system would insure best practices and a stable distribution of political and economic power. Energy can be quickly distributed through a cascading system of super breeding, conversion (fertile to fissile in reactor), and synthetic production of energy carriers like H2 or NH3.

Simple.

Can we manufacture tens of thousands of machines globally? I'm trying to find out if there are significant physical limitations, but I think we can solve the political problems of nuclear power with the right system.

This is the "greenest" energy system I've ever stumbled across (all from decades old technology- MSRE and PACER), and really the only way that I've seen that we *might* address the scale of global energy need. So, put me in with Edward Teller, Ralph W. Moir, and Alvin Weinberg.

So, we mass produce our fissile without escalating U mining operations. Th will become widely available from the rare earth mining waste stream. Our fissile is used to start new machines at a rate largely determined by the desired neutron spectrum (a harder spectrum requires more fissile) and our super breeding capacity. This is what I imagine will constitute the Thorium Race in the years to come.

But this is impossible under the current regulatory regime. The super breeders function by way of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives (miniature fusion charges from 2-20 kt), and the high quality fissile is a major security risk. So, governments that host super breeder facilities get a piece of the reactor manufacturing industry. Security of fissile is managed through locality, just-in-time manufacturing (so no stockpiling), open international monitoring of production, small heavily shielded transport canisters, and gamma radiation from U232. Once the machine is up and running, it breeds new fissile from inserted Th232.

An international agreement on this system would insure best practices and a stable distribution of political and economic power. Energy can be quickly distributed through a cascading system of super breeding, conversion (fertile to fissile in reactor), and synthetic production of energy carriers like H2 or NH3.

Simple.

Can we manufacture tens of thousands of machines globally? I'm trying to find out if there are significant physical limitations, but I think we can solve the political problems of nuclear power with the right system.

This is the "greenest" energy system I've ever stumbled across (all from decades old technology- MSRE and PACER), and really the only way that I've seen that we *might* address the scale of global energy need. So, put me in with Edward Teller, Ralph W. Moir, and Alvin Weinberg.

Potential problems:

Proliferation of bomb grade U233 from chemical separation of Protactinium since MSR's require operating a chemical processing plant with the reactor.

Bombs are easier to enrich uranium than breeder reactors or enrichment facilities?

You would probably run out of nickel since the alloy most likely to succeed in MSR's is some Hastelloy alloy.

So, we mass produce our fissile without escalating U mining operations. Th will become widely available from the rare earth mining waste stream. Our fissile is used to start new machines at a rate largely determined by the desired neutron spectrum (a harder spectrum requires more fissile) and our super breeding capacity. This is what I imagine will constitute the Thorium Race in the years to come.

But this is impossible under the current regulatory regime. The super breeders function by way of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives (miniature fusion charges from 2-20 kt), and the high quality fissile is a major security risk. So, governments that host super breeder facilities get a piece of the reactor manufacturing industry. Security of fissile is managed through locality, just-in-time manufacturing (so no stockpiling), open international monitoring of production, small heavily shielded transport canisters, and gamma radiation from U232. Once the machine is up and running, it breeds new fissile from inserted Th232.

An international agreement on this system would insure best practices and a stable distribution of political and economic power. Energy can be quickly distributed through a cascading system of super breeding, conversion (fertile to fissile in reactor), and synthetic production of energy carriers like H2 or NH3.

Simple.

Can we manufacture tens of thousands of machines globally? I'm trying to find out if there are significant physical limitations, but I think we can solve the political problems of nuclear power with the right system.

This is the "greenest" energy system I've ever stumbled across (all from decades old technology- MSRE and PACER), and really the only way that I've seen that we *might* address the scale of global energy need. So, put me in with Edward Teller, Ralph W. Moir, and Alvin Weinberg.

Potential problems:

Proliferation of bomb grade U233 from chemical separation of Protactinium since MSR's require operating a chemical processing plant with the reactor.

Bombs are easier to enrich uranium than breeder reactors or enrichment facilities?

You would probably run out of nickel since the alloy most likely to succeed in MSR's is some Hastelloy alloy.

Yes they do, and it is entirely true that you can design the machine to separate out the fissile if you like.

And Ni appears (Wikipedia) to be estimated at 130 million tons globally counting ores 1% and up. How many tons per GWe? It's a good question. All of the molten salt components. There is the possibility of new materials. Radiation resistant materials were being examined for use in the long term storage of some waste.

Beryllium might be a problem- ~400,000 tons worldwide. There are other moderators like carbon.

We're putting out cheap energy with our fissile which will be protected by gamma radiation in the hot cell. If someone wants fissile, why not use the energy from these reactors or something else to covertly enrich or breed the supply with another purpose built facility?

Fissile is like gasoline x 10^6. Just treat it like such in the system and culture.

One you forgot is the ATMEA which is a joint venture between AREVA and Mitsubishi started after they realized that the market for the giant sized and expensive EPR and APWR designs is limited and that they have no chance for design wins in many of the emerging nuclear markets. It includes the APWR advanced accumulator and the EPR core catcher in a 3 loop 1100 MWe design.

I really don't see what this thorium interest is all about. Anything designed to breed from thorium should also work fine for depleted uranium, of which there's ridiculous amounts just laying around, while the thorium is barely used in anything (welding rods?) and is not laying around.

I really don't see what this thorium interest is all about. Anything designed to breed from thorium should also work fine for depleted uranium, of which there's ridiculous amounts just laying around, while the thorium is barely used in anything (welding rods?) and is not laying around.

Lower fissile startup requirements, simpler fuel cycle, more abundant fuel, the thermal cycle which can breed fuel- all make for an attractive machine that we can build many examples of.

The most problematic component of the waste is fission products (e.g. Cs-137 , half life about 30 years), those are pretty much equally present per-MWH.

LWR waste has the volume of untouched Uranium with stuff mixed in, with the lifetime of transuranics, and the heat load and immediate danger of of highly active fission products.

If you want to improve the waste problem, a reactor whose waste only suffers from one of those problems instead of all 3 is an important improvement.

More like an entirely unimportant improvement as the biggest problem is the fission products. It just sounds important when discussed in terms of years.

Dude, years are important. You don't get to say they're not just because you hate fission products in particular and it fills you with rage that they exist anywhere at all.

Look. Even in a very severe accident - Chernobyl or Fukushima, take your pick - the only significant hazard has been fission products. Even in a reactor melt down and an explosion, transuranics do not go anywhere, because they have non reactive, ultra high vaporization point oxides. The fission products are virtually the only thing that matters. The rest, well, when we run out of uranium, we can put transuranics from old fuel to a good use, using better technology. Or just bury 'em, storing chemically non active stuff for thousands years is not such a big issue.

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For ~1 gigawatt year of power LWR waste would be ~35 tons, thorium breeder waste would be ~1 ton, of which 80% will be inert after decades.

Highly misleading figures.

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Seems to me effort to contain 200 kg for 300 years is importantly less than effort to contain 35000 kg for >100000 years.

This is idiotic. Firstly, any sane scheme would dilute those 200kg into many tons anyway just because it is in fact EASIER to store in a more dilute form, secondarily, those 35 tons consist predominantly of much less harmful shit. And thirdly, but most importantly for rhetorical purposes, 300 years is 10 half-lifes (of Cs-137), or factor of 1024 decay, meaning a: it is too short time, and b: you are just repeating some ridiculous startup's bullshit PR.

And what's going to happen in practice is that virtually all of environmental contamination and of human exposure due to operation of reactors will come from reactor accidents (which are going to keep happening at a rate not dramatically different from historical rate of about 1 per 100 per reactor life time), where you'll need level 8 and level 9 on the accident scale just to accommodate breeder accidents, with tens Chernobyls worth of fission product in the active core. Actually what is going to really happen is that the whole field will get closed after the first accident, which will be anticipated by investors, and so this BS will not be built in the first place.

I really don't see what this thorium interest is all about. Anything designed to breed from thorium should also work fine for depleted uranium, of which there's ridiculous amounts just laying around, while the thorium is barely used in anything (welding rods?) and is not laying around.

Lower fissile startup requirements, simpler fuel cycle, more abundant fuel, the thermal cycle which can breed fuel- all make for an attractive machine that we can build many examples of.

Well, so far I'm pretty sure thorium is a lot more expensive than uranium-238 . What I see is that advantages of thorium are being massively overhyped by (fairly ridiculous) nuclear startups (e.g. terrestial energy inc. linked in this article), which means they are not trustworthy.

edit: note, by the way, that the likes of Andrea Rossi have no particular deeply ingrained love for things like cold fusion. Some do choose cold fusion, most make startups in something that is in principle workable. Just because it is in principle workable doesn't mean you don't have to be vigilant about BS. In this particular case, using thorium does not give any big immediate advantage; it is only necessary for conning investors into thinking that your startup is going to somehow circumvent the difficulties of reactor design by simply using thorium rather than uranium.

And thirdly, but most importantly for rhetorical purposes, 300 years is 10 half-lifes (of Cs-137), or factor of 1024 decay, meaning a: it is too short time, and b: you are just repeating some ridiculous startup's bullshit PR.

So double it and get a factor of a million. Not a big deal compared to hundreds of thousands of years.

Actually what is going to really happen is that the whole field will get closed after the first accident, which will be anticipated by investors, and so this BS will not be built in the first place.

I don't think we'll get that far, solar is going to be undercutting nuclear before anyone builds a utility scale plant of this type. Solar iterates too fast, and nuclear financing and construction is glacial in comparison.

I wouldn't mind if they did build breeders, I just don't think it's going to work out that way.

Look. Even in a very severe accident - Chernobyl or Fukushima, take your pick - the only significant hazard has been fission products.

Wasn't talking about accidents. Just because that's your axe to grind doesn't mean that's what every post is about.

But realistically, most of people's exposure in the context of nuclear power is to accidents at reactors. Waste storage literally can't match the accidents. Waste storage is an overblown problem, which is very bad. The spent fuel doesn't really enter the picture other than via potential accidents when it is very badly stored in the spent fuel pool and somehow catches fire.

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It's an important improvement in the context given.

Though it seems to me a molten salt design capable of cooling without external water or power would have been nice at Fukushima.

There's other nasty accidents one can have with the reprocessing plant involved if there's one. There's always potential manufacturing defects (recall the fukush. I just don't see the failure rate jumping from something around 1 per 100 reactor-lifetimes (uniform-ish across western and soviet designs, no less), to 1 per 1000 reactor-lifetimes.

And thirdly, but most importantly for rhetorical purposes, 300 years is 10 half-lifes (of Cs-137), or factor of 1024 decay, meaning a: it is too short time, and b: you are just repeating some ridiculous startup's bullshit PR.

So double it and get a factor of a million. Not a big deal compared to hundreds of thousands of years.

In the thorium waste, you still get actinides, and you still get Tc-99, and - I am not a nuclear expert at any rate so there'll be the other stuff that I do not know off the top of my head. Bottom line is, you still want it to sit undisturbed for a very long time, if for Tc-99 alone.

Actually what is going to really happen is that the whole field will get closed after the first accident, which will be anticipated by investors, and so this BS will not be built in the first place.

I don't think we'll get that far, solar is going to be undercutting nuclear before anyone builds a utility scale plant of this type. Solar iterates too fast, and nuclear financing and construction is glacial in comparison.

I wouldn't mind if they did build breeders, I just don't think it's going to work out that way.

Ahh, we're kinda in agreement then. I just can't stand this BS hype about the advantages of thorium, expressed in abundances (in the earth crust, not of deposits you can effectively mine) or years of storage. You still want this stuff sitting undisturbed for thousands years, and that's not a really difficult part anyway - difficulty is that given false statements with regards to safety of the nuclear power plants, people won't trust the waste storage site not to do something bad in first couple hundred years. Inclusive of things like ok we changed our minds we're digging that shit up now and reprocessing it on-site, whoops, an accident. Regular person is not an expert so their decision is about trusting experts, and trust can't go very far given the circumstances. And this problem won't be alleviated by the waste that is equally bad for first few hundreds years. And the attempts to argue in terms of tonnes... once Joe Public is explained some relevant unit of badness and knows there's as many of it, Joe Public lowers his trust of experts. From Joe Public's perspective, whenever he's going to approve burial of it in his backyard is all about how much he's being deceived (Joe Public knows he's not an expert himself, and it is the trust in official experts that made him give their statements more weight than greenpeace). In tech world, with the autistic literalness, if something is technically true it's not a lie, but not in Joe Public's world, it is much more nuanced and is about the amount of intentional deception.

The bad thing about Fukushima is that - given that Joe Public has been convinced that something like this was not going to happen - the most sensible thing for Joe Public is to trust what he's convinced of considerably less in the future, and give different sides more equal weight than before.

The bad thing about Fukushima is that - given that Joe Public has been convinced that something like this was not going to happen - the most sensible thing for Joe Public is to trust what he's convinced of considerably less in the future, and give different sides more equal weight than before.

Good point. Before Fukushima, the only commercial reactor to make a big mess, Chernobyl, was designed with an inflammable moderator, carbon. BWRs were touted as superior and "immune" from such troubles, with Three-mile Island an example of such immunity, not to mention the implicit chauvinism associated with U.S-U.S.S.R. relations back then.

The lack of widespread publication of the dispersal of the nuclides released from TMI, in comparison to Chernobyl, still amazes me, by the way.

There's other nasty accidents one can have with the reprocessing plant involved if there's one. There's always potential manufacturing defects (recall the fukush. I just don't see the failure rate jumping from something around 1 per 100 reactor-lifetimes (uniform-ish across western and soviet designs, no less), to 1 per 1000 reactor-lifetimes.

I think it could be done if there were a vibrant economy around the things and tighter design cycles. If they keep taking 20-40 years for each iteration solar will clobber them.

That's why I think smaller designs are so interesting, even though I still don't think those will be enough.